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The Lead

“We’ve seen investors around the world looking at the risks associated with climate change as an integral part of investment decisions they make,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stated yesterday as a response to some of Canada’s largest energy companies being blacklisted by a Norwegian $1-trillion wealth fund and Japan’s largest bank announcing that it will be limiting the business it does with oil sands.

“There is a need for clear leadership and clear targets to reach on fighting climate change to draw on global capital,” Trudeau said.

Alberta Energy Minister Sonya Savage made a statement saying that excluding the Imperial Oil Ltd., Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., Suncor Energy Inc. and Cenovus Energy Inc. was “poorly informed and highly hypocritical,” and noting that between 2011 and 2017, oil sands operations have seen a 19-per-cent reduction in their emissions.

According to a statement from Alex Pourbaix, the Chief Executive of Cenovus, “pulling investments from the oil sands and claiming it’s for climate change reasons is more about publicity than fact.” By 2030, Cenovus intends to have reduced its emissions by 30 per cent.

Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. has identified five new cases of COVID-19 at their Horizon mining site that are connected to cases from the Northern Alberta oil sands mine, according to Alberta Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Deena Hinshaw. This is the second mining site to experience an outbreak of the virus, the first being Imperial Oil Ltd.’s Kearl mine, which first announced its first wave of the virus last month, reports Bloomberg.

Cases of the virus have increased to 107 at the Kearl mine location, according to a statement made by Dr. Hinshaw at a press conference yesterday.

Findings from a study taken on by the U.S Labor Department show that the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted the loss of close to 600,000 jobs in U.S.’s clean-energy sector. According to data from assessment groups such as the American Council on Renewable Energy and E2, 18 per cent of the workers in green energy applied for benefits under the country’s unemployment program in March and April, according to Bloomberg.

The number of jobs lost during the pandemic is more than double the number of jobs that have been created in the sector since 2017. California and Texas are some of the states that have been impacted the most.

In other news, the International Energy Agency has said that the environment of the oil market has “improved somewhat” compared to last month due to the agreement by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its ally countries to cut their oil production, as well as the U.S. beginning to reduce its oil drilling, Bloomberg wrote.

The IEA said crude supply in the U.S. had fallen by 745,000 barrels to 531.5 million barrels last week and predicts that oil supply will decrease by 5.5 million barrels in the second half of the year. OPEC also forecasts a the global demand for oil to fall by 9.07 million barrels per day this year, it said yesterday, according to Reuters.